Chapter 30 – Ben
Chapter
Thirty
BEN
I didn’t realize the fire had gone out until I couldn’t feel my hands.
They were just… there. Numb, hanging over my knees, my fingers slack around an empty tumbler. My side throbbed in time with my heartbeat, a hot, dragging ache under the bandages. Every breath scraped over the stitches. It should have been a reminder that I was alive.
Instead, it just felt like proof that the universe had bad aim.
Chrissy was gone.
She was gone, and she’d taken the only thing that mattered with her: the possibility that, someday, she might look at me and not see a monster.
The room was starting to fade around the edges, shadows creeping in as the hearth cooled. Someone had banked the fire earlier — probably Henry, probably while I’d been too drunk or too drugged to notice — but I’d let it dwindle into ember dust without moving. Without caring.
What was the point of heat in a house she wasn’t in?
The glass slipped from my numb fingers and hit the rug with a muffled thud. I didn’t even flinch.
“Sir.”
Henry’s voice came from somewhere behind me, calm and steady and annoyingly alive.
I didn’t look at him.
“You gonna yell at me about the whiskey again?”
“Tempting,” he said. “But no.”
My mouth twisted.
“You finally running out of lectures?”
“What I’m running out of is patience,” Henry snapped.
That got my attention. I lifted my head and looked at him over my shoulder. He stood near the doorway, arms crossed, expression flat in that way I’d learned meant he was only keeping from losing his shit by sheer force of will.
“You should be in bed,” he said. “Doctor’s orders.”
“Chair’s closer to the fire,” I mumbled.
“You let the fire go out quite a while ago, it seems.”
“Not my best decision,” I muttered. “But trust me, I’ve made worse ones.”
His jaw flexed.
“Yes. I’m well acquainted with all your bad decisions.”
I deserved that, so I didn’t bother to argue with him.
He strode past me, leaned down, and added two thick logs to the ashes, rearranging them with practiced movements.
He ignored me as he worked to get the fire re-lit.
In another life he could’ve been a damn fine butler instead of an ex-special forces head of security and the man who knew where every one of my bodies was buried… metaphorical and otherwise.
A mental image of him dressed up in a spiffy suit like Alfred materialized in my mind and I snorted out a soft laugh.
A spark caught. Flames licked up. Heat pushed outward, but I was still cold.
“You need to eat something,” he said.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You haven’t been hungry in two days.”
“Congratulations,” I said. “You diagnosed heartbreak, doc.”
“Don’t be a smartass.”
I let my head tip back against the high leather wing of the chair and stared at the ceiling beams. Dark wood. Old. Solid. Everything in this place was built to last, except the one thing I’d actually wanted: my future with Chrissy.
“You know,” I said, “the last thing she said before she walked out was that she would’ve jumped in with both feet with me without the lies, without the games, without any of this.”
Henry was quiet for a long moment.
“Sounds to me like you should have led with that four years ago,” he said.
I huffed out a humorless breath.
“Yeah. That would’ve required me not being a coward.”
“If I recall, I did suggest that you do exactly that, but you refused to go out in public again after the hardware store incident.”
“I remember, Henry, but like I said… I’m a fucking coward.”
Silence reigned again, except for the low crackle of the fire gathering strength.
“Ben,” Henry said finally, “we need to talk about Vivian.”
There it was. The thin thread of obligation tethering me to a world I didn’t want to exist in anymore.
“No, we don’t,” I said.
“Yes, we do.” His tone sharpened. “You’re running out of time.”
“I was always running out of time.”
He moved around to face me fully, blocking the firelight, arms crossed over his chest.
“Christmas Eve,” he said. “You’ve got six days.”
“Five and a half,” I corrected automatically. “The clause specifies before midnight.”
“Five and a half days,” he allowed. “To get married and stay married for a minimum of five years, or Vivian gets everything.”
“I know how contracts work. I’ve had lawyers on retainer for my entire life, remember?”
“You also have staff,” he said, voice low. “People who live on this estate and depend on it. Contractors. Charities you fund. Town projects. The hockey program you wanted to build at Stonewood University. Vivian will dismantle all of it.”
“I’m aware,” I snapped.
“Are you?” His eyes flashed. “Because from where I’m standing, you’re sitting in the dark trying to pickle your liver instead of giving a damn that the woman who murdered your father is about to be handed the keys to his legacy.”
The words hit harder than I liked.
I clenched my jaw.
“You think I don’t care about my father’s legacy?”
“I think you’re drowning,” he said bluntly. “And you’re pretending that if you sink fast enough, none of this will be your problem anymore.”
I opened my mouth, ready with some sarcastic reply, something that would deflect, distract, anything… but nothing came out because he was right.
It used to be so simple before the accident, before the coma, before I woke up in a world where my father was dead, my stepmother was circling like a vulture, and the only way to keep everything he’d built from being gutted was to agree to a marriage clause he’d written when he still thought I’d be whole.
Get married. Stay married five years. Continue the Stonewood bloodline. It had felt hypothetical at the time. Distant. Something Future Ben would handle.
Then I’d walked into Stonewood Hardware one winter evening and a girl with big brown eyes and a bossy mouth had told the cashiers to move their asses and get me a first aid kit, and suddenly, hypothetical didn’t cut it anymore.
Chrissy.
My chest throbbed in a way that had nothing to do with the stitches in my side.
“Look at me,” Henry said quietly.
I forced my gaze back to his face.
“You have options,” he said. “They’re not all good, but they exist.”
“Let me guess,” I drawled. “Number one: I roll over, do nothing, and let Vivian carve the estate up like a Christmas ham.”
“Correct.”
I lifted my hand in a mocking little ta-da.
“See? Still good with strategy.”
“Option two,” he said, ignoring me, “you marry one of the remaining contestants who wasn’t eliminated before two of your hired actors went rogue and shot the Game to shit.”
My entire body recoiled at the suggestion.
“No.”
“Ben—”
“No.” The word came out rough and dangerous. “Pick another option.”
“You’re not in a position to be picky,” he said.
“The contract doesn’t care how you feel about the woman involved.
It cares that there is one. The other contestants signed NDAs.
We could frame it as a windfall for whichever one you chose.
Five years of convenience, separate lives as needed, payout at the end.
Cold. Clean. Legal. No one would need to know it was anything other than a business arrangement. ”
“Fuck. No.”
He exhaled hard through his nose.
“You can’t keep saying that as if it’s an argument.”
“It is an argument.”
“It’s a tantrum.”
I shot him a look.
“Careful.”
“Or what?” he said calmly. “You’ll fire me? Too late. I was your father’s head of security before I was yours. I promised him I’d keep you from doing anything irretrievably stupid, and right now you’re sprinting toward that cliff as fast as you can.”
My hands curled into fists.
“I am not marrying some random contestant as a — what did you call it? — ‘business arrangement’.”
“You picked them,” he reminded me. “Or at least signed off on them. You picked women who were, on paper, compatible enough to share your life.”
“I picked women the board liked the idea of… except for Chrissy,” I snapped. “Don’t romanticize my vetting process.”
“Then marry one of them anyway.”
“No.”
“Ben—”
“Henry.” My voice dropped, rough as gravel. “I would rather lose everything I own than stand in front of a judge and put a ring on someone I can’t even picture holding my hand.”
His gaze narrowed.
“This isn’t about holding hands.”
“Of course it is,” I bit out. “What the hell else do you think a marriage is? You think my father wrote that clause because he cared about legal technicalities? He wanted me to have what he had with my mother before she died, and Vivian sank her claws into him. He wanted… he wanted a family. Something real. Something he trusted me with.” My throat burned.
“I am not spitting on that by turning it into a five-year business arrangement with a stranger.”
Henry’s shoulders dropped a fraction. Some of the push went out of him, replaced by quiet resignation.
“So what?” he asked. “You curl up here and watch her take everything away from you? Is that your plan?”
“My plan,” I said, “is to accept the consequences of the mess I made… whatever that means.”
He stared at me for a long, long moment.
And then, very softly, “What about the consequences to everyone else?”
Guilt hit like a sledgehammer blow to my gut.
The staff. The people who’d been here since I was a child, who’d watched me grow up, who’d held this place together while I was in a coma.
Lucia and her meals that still somehow tasted like my mother’s cooking.
Groundskeepers, housekeepers, mechanics.
The foundation my father started. The scholarship fund.
The D1 hockey program and team I wanted to build at Stonewood University that might never exist now.
All of it, dangling over Vivian’s waiting claws.
“For what it’s worth,” I said hoarsely, “before you walked in, I was seriously considering signing it all over to the staff as a collective. I would love to find a way to lock it up in a trust she can’t touch.”
His eyebrows shot up.
“You can’t do that without violating the clause. Your father’s lawyers will fight you from all sides.”
“I know.”